By the third day, Princess Liuruo was too exhausted to push.

All she could see beyond the mound of her belly was a pair of small feet, blue and immobile for the past few hours. She had watched births to prepare for her own. This was not how babies should be coming out.

The doctors had said her hips were too narrow, warned her against the dangers of carrying a child. She had ignored them, and perhaps now it was time for her to pay for her impudence.

Her vision was blurry, everything fading into shades of red, brown, and white. Despite her screams, however, she could hear the bustle of the midwives clearly. The clink of metal tools on porcelain; the splash of water as it was wrung from cloth, the same cloth that was soon placed on her face. Their voices rippled across Liuruo’s field of vision, each one a different pattern and hue.

That was how she noticed when a new voice began to speak. This one was a cool light green, the pleasing cool feeling of jade on skin. It was oddly familiar.

“The position is wrong. The head cannot come out after the feet. I must extract the baby another way.” Someone’s hand was on her belly, stripping away her clothes until only flesh remained. There was only a scream to warn her before something sharp and hot cut into her. Two maids on each side of her held her down as she writhed in agony, the only respite coming in the form of strong wine and the sound of her baby crying.

She must have fainted, because the next thing she remembered was waking to a cool hand as it brushed strands of wet hair from her forehead. Liuruo realized she was being held in someone’s lap. She was glad her husband had not deigned to attend this birth, as he would have fits about the impropriety. Within the arms of this maid or midwife, she felt safe. Her child would be born, she prayed, turning her head to rest on the woman’s cool silk robe. Her vision was filled entirely by emerald green.

“Hush, Ruoruo,” a voice whispered. “Everything will be alright. 娘儿在. Your mother is here.”

-

As nursemaids, midwives, and the royal physician busied themselves around the princess and her newborn child, Lady Liuying let herself fade from the background and left the estate. There was no reason to linger as long as the incision was stitched up and the mother rested.

She did not indulge herself in the cruelty of hope. She did not dwell in the fantasy of staying by her daughter’s side, waiting for her love to walk through the door. Prince Wenrong, who she had not seen for over a decade, would look older than she remembered him. From her frequent nighttime scrying, she knew his hair had turned completely gray and he now walked with a stoop. But there was so much she couldn’t see through water and shadows. There was an aura of vitality that surrounded living things when seen directly by her eyes. The few brief moments when she could again hold Ruoruo in her lap and be a mother again; the colors were sharper, sounds and smells stronger because her senses were greedily taking them all in and inscribing them into memory. Because this was the last night. Lady Liuying was sure of it.

These were the final hours of her life.

She turned back into a snake and disappeared into the shadows of Chang’an. For a city so bustling with life and commerce deep into the night, shadows were easy to find. Each light, each structure, was the source of a new umbra. The streets had changed but the city remained the same. Liuying moved like a leaf carried by river currents, hopping on estuaries and back allies until her internal compass told her she was where she wanted to be.

A new king ruled over the Tang. With him were new consorts occupying the inner chambers; the old mother consorts either siloed in abandoned recesses, sent back to their families, or confined to nunneries. Some new consort now occupied Consort Si’s chambers. Her garden of rare and poisonous flowers had been uprooted and replaced with gaudy stone statues.

This was where she first met Li Wenrong. Where the golden carp leapt over the now-rotted over bridge, and she cured a young prince of her own poison on a whim.

But this was not the place for her to die. An unfamiliar courtyard that belonged to some upstart concubine. No mother-in-law’s arms for her to find comfort in for one last time.

Lady Liuying turned back into a snake and continued along the path of time. This time she followed the water, out of imperial grounds and out of the city, until the sounds of humans was replaced by the sound of wind in the grass and rushing water. Out of Chang’an but not too far from it, beside a rushing river and an old fallen tree. Time had rotted the wood touching the water; the middle had given out and collapsed into the water.

Once it could have been used as a bridge to walk across; once a foolish prince had tried to coax his horse over in pursuit of a beautiful woman on the other side. Now she knelt at the base where gnarled roots that once held firmly to the ground were reaching towards the sky eand waited for death to come.

She did not have to wait long. From the heavens a young warrior descended upon flaming wheels and brandished his spear towards her. “Snake Demon, you know your crime?” This voice should be imperious, coming from anywhere but the body of a child. Instead it wavered, as it should when a filial son is asked to kill a loyal mother.

Lady Liuying did not bow in the presence of a god. Instead, she rose to her feet. “I was hoping to die at the hands of my friend.”

“She asked me this favor instead,” Nezha the Third Lotus Prince said.

“Pity. I was hoping not to fight.” She had no weapon but her hands, no armor but the robes on her back, but it was enough. She reached through her robes and dragged her nails against her skin. From her shoulders she shook loose shining scales and used them to create a barrier against the wreathe of flame Nezha sent her way.

“I take no joy in this, demon,” Nezha said as Lady Liuying forced him back with an onslaught of scales as sharp as knives. Blood began to cake beneath her fingernails.

“Either kill me with conviction or bring the crane to do it. I will not die to a pitying child.”

The Third Lotus Prince gave no answer but continued to give ground. Liuying knew this was not due to her superior skill. If she posed an actual threat, the boy would summon his three heads and six arms to truly fight her. No, he merely gave way because he was still a boy who loved his mother.

She saw a flash of steel out of the corner of her eye and brought up a wall of scales to block the incoming three-pronged spear. Erlang Shen glowered at her with his three eyes, though his ire was not directed at her.

“What is taking so long, Nezha? You were dispatched to kill this demon an hour ago. You can strike her down at any time.”

Nezha wound a part of his Armillary Sash around his spear. A nervous tic, Liuying realized.

“She was just helping her kid,” he said. “Why does she need to die?”

“Because she broke Heaven’s law. She had accepted her death the moment she stepped foot in Chang’an.”

“Can’t Heaven be merciful just this once?”

“It has already been plenty merciful to her kind.”

Liuying turned and glared at a man who once rescued his mother from beneath a mountain, only to condemn his sister to the same fate years later. “I accept my death,” Liuying said, “but not my executioners. Let the one who set the law deliver my death. Else I die knowing the gods in Heaven’s employ are all cowards and hypocrites.”

Erlang Shen closed two of his three eyes and scowled. “This was the kin you chose.”

Arms surrounded Lady Liuying from behind as a golden knife was driven into her stomach, close to where she had cut into her own daughter to free her grandson. The she leaned into the arms’ embrace and looked up at her killer.

Bixian’s face held no emotion as she drove the knife further up towards Lady Liuying’s chest. The snake demon let out a final breath, a rueful laugh, as the Knife of Sublimation finally took her demonhood as she had begged more than a decade ago.

Lady Liuying had mulled over her dying words for over a decade, and she said them now:

“Forgive me, my dragon brother and phoenix sister. For my selfishness, I deserve to die twice by your blade.”

As the snake demon died, so did the spells she wove in her lifetime. The memories that had previously been hidden in shadow revealed themselves anew to her husband and daughter.

-

The house of the Marquis Zhao was in an uproar. After three days of labor, his son was born by dagger. The child was soon swaddled and put into the care of the wetnurse. The new mother, however, refused to rest, instead calling out desperately for a sword. Servants rushed from room to room, arguing amongst each other who would present the swords from the armory to the mistress, for that would be the same person to receive the master’s wrath.

The entire house was awake, whispers spreading quickly that the mistress had gone insane.

“The sword,” Princess Liuruo kept on crying, unable to sit up due to the wound on her stomach. Each sob caused sharp pains along the incision that delivered her son, but she could not stop herself from crying. “Where is it? The sword that Xingbei gave me. It was four years ago, and I almost sent him away. I didn’t know who he was—I couldn’t remember who he was.”

Her hand went up to her head and she clutched the hair ornament she always wore; a simple jeweled thing of midnight back and pearl white. It was her and her mother’s scales, she realized. All the hidden memories were rushing back: her time in the mountains, the joy of her tail that was taken away, being with her father and mother in the capitol until the day her mother left.

The sword.

A discerning servant took a horse to call upon the princess’ father; Prince Wenrong was already waiting at his gate with horse ready to follow the servant to his son-in-law’s estate.

Issues of propriety were swept aside, and Prince Wenrong was brought to his daughter’s bedside.

“The sword is safe, daughter,” the prince whispered. He held Liuruo’s hand as she wept. It took all of his strength to not collapse on the floor next to her, but she did not need to bear the trauma of watching her father weep. Not when the two of them had over a decade of mourning thrust onto them all at once.

Once Liuruo was resting, Prince Wenrong returned to his own estate. He summoned for the sword that had been brought to him years ago, by a young man he thought a stranger but had once considered kin. Holding the remnants of his former comrades in his hand, he collapsed to his knees and wept.